Vertical flash sheet of black and grey engraved designs, including a skull with candle, an eye, crossed bones, hands, scales and a plague doctor, with Latin lettering.

Vertical sheet of occult and engraved motifs

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A tall vertical sheet of stacked tattoo designs drawn in white linework on a dark background. Motifs include a skull with a candle, an eye with rays, crossed bones, hands with handcuffs, a skull with laurel, candlesticks, scales, a sun and moon, and a plague doctor, separated by Latin phrases and initials. The engraved style uses fine hatching and radiating lines, with the composition arranged in evenly spaced bands.

Traditional Skull Candle Eye Bone Hand Scale Sun Moon Laurel Arrow Lightning Lettering Latin text

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The auction house on Rue Sainte-Catherine had shut its doors at four, but Marguerite kept the lamp burning in the back room, where the sheets of old engravings lay flat in their drawers. Rain ticked against the skylight. Somewhere below, a tram bell rang twice and went quiet. She had been sorting the lot for three days, and the last of it was a long strip of printed emblems that no one had catalogued, the sort of thing a dead apothecary might have pasted above his bench to frighten apprentices. Skulls with candles fixed to their crowns. An eye sending out rays like a sun. Hands held together in chains, and a plague doctor with his beaked mask turned toward the margin, as if he had heard his name.

Keep reading

The Latin ran down the sheet between the pictures. ABSIT REVERENTIA VERO. AB ORIGINE FIDELIS. Beneath each phrase were two initials, B and D, and a third letter she could not place, repeated in the corners like a signature someone had been practising. She pulled the lens across the page and counted the bands. Nine of them, evenly spaced, each one a small locked room.

At the bottom, where the doctor's beak pointed at nothing, a slip of paper had been tucked into the fold. The hand was thin and rushed. Do not sell the lower half, it read. The scales will be claimed. Marguerite turned the sheet over. On the reverse, in the same ink, someone had drawn a single candle, lit, and beneath it a row of tiny stars that might have been a count of the nights left before the claimant came. She put the lamp closer. The flame on the paper trembled, and she realised the rain had stopped.